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Obama kept Law Review balanced

In recent months, Obama's stewardship of the Review has generated a small dust-up in the blogosphere, with some critics insisting that "Obama's Volume 104 is the least-cited volume of the Harvard Law Review in the last 20 years." The claim has methodological problems, however, including the fact that Obama oversaw only the first four issues of that volume. Review veterans said he would have had an increasing influence on — as well as a final read of — the latter half of Volume 103, then a diminishing influence over the second half of Volume 104, produced after he left the presidency.

Moreover, with the exception of the Foreword, Review articles are selected by a committee of editors, with the president merely the first among equals. Still, the substance of the Review offers a glimpse at the environment in which Obama came to the law, and the eight issues that Obama presided over have enough material to keep the blogosphere busy for months. Among the more interesting pieces:

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• March 1990 — This issue, the first of Obama’s presidency, has an article by University of Florida associate law professor Anthony Cook on "the reconstructive theology of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr." The article ends with a theme that would later emerge in Obama's speeches: "With such mutual respect and openness to each others' pain, suffering and faith, we must work out more fully and struggle towards King's ideal of the Beloved Community and thereby hew from our mountain of despair a stone of hope."

• April 1990 — An unbylined note titled "Rethinking (M)otherhood: Feminist Theory and State Regulation of Pregnancy" asks whether the state should consider the potential for endangering the fetus when pregnant women abuse drugs. The author suggests that the problem's positioning as a conflict between fetal and maternal rights is "both illegitimate and counterproductive" and concludes that policies should to be recast to expand, rather than restrict, women's reproductive rights.

• June 1990 — This issue included five responses to “Racial Critiques of Legal Academia,” a highly controversial article published in the Review before Obama became its president. The article — written by Randall Kennedy, a black professor at Harvard Law — argued against the idea that legal scholars of color have a unique and at times uniquely valuable voice on issues related to race.

The first entry in the colloquy is prefaced by a quote from performer and civil rights activist Paul Robeson’s 1934 article “The Culture of the Negro” — "The white man has made a fetish of intellect and worships the god of thought; the negro feels rather than thinks" — and several quotes from the now largely forgotten but once highly controversial racial provocateur Frantz Fanon, among them: “If the white man challenges my humanity, I will impose my whole weight as a man on his life and show him that I am not the ‘sho’ good eatin'’ that he persists in imagining.”

• November 1990 — This issue included perhaps the most conservative piece of Obama's tenure, in which Ronald Reagan’s former Solicitor General Charles Fried attacked race-based affirmative action, calling it "racial balkanization" that would "impoverish the human race." The implications of group rights, he wrote, are "sinister."

• February 1991 — Obama's last issue contains one of its most sharply liberal pieces, a study of race and gender in car sales, which, the editors say in an equally liberal introduction, provides "evidence that seriously challenge faith in the ability of competitive market forces to eliminate racial and gender discrimination in other markets" and calls for more government action.

In the end, though, Obama's time on the Review mirrored other aspects of his life. Even in the staunchly liberal milieus in which he has spent his entire adult life, Obama has managed to lead without leaving a clear ideological stamp, and to respect — and even, at times, to embrace — opposing views. To his critics, that's a sign of a lack of core beliefs. To his admirers, it's the root of his appeal.

"To understand what someone else is trying to say isn't just an editorial skill," said McConnell. "It's a life skill.”

Readers' Comments (2520)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In August 2006, Mr. Obama visited Kenya and spoke in support of Mr. Odinga's candidacy at rallies in Nairobi . In short, Mr. Odinga in effect offered to Islamize Kenya in return for Muslim votes, despite the fact that Muslims make up only 10% of the population, compared to the 80% who are Christian. Mr. Odinga himself is nominally an Anglican, yet he signed a document that refers to Islam throughout as "the one true religion" and denigrates Christians as "worshippers of the cross." The Web site Atlas Shrugs has even posted a photograph of the two men side by side. More recently, Mr. Odinga says that Mr. Obama interrupted his campaigning in New Hampshire to have a telephone conversation with his African cousin about the constitutional crisis in Kenya, yep thisa is good stuff people!!

Hey dummyrummy! Why would it matter if Obama was a muslim, and how would it sink his campaign? Furthermore, what does this have to do with the content of this article? I thought it was about Obama's tenure as president of the Harvard Law Review.

who in the heck is this character yeah the revioew said he is the most liberal canidate in us history even more liberal than adalia stephenson, why do you think john kennedy wanted adalia to loose he was to radical. hillary is like robert and john kennedy and obama is like adalia and jimmy carter!! he did work at harvard and he was quite liberzal their no moderate stances

I see. You're simply a spambot with poor spelling and copy-pasted articles that people have seen a thousand times before. Carry on, then. I hope whoever is paying you is paying you well.

I know I woke up this morning asking myself: "Self, how has Barack Obama's oversight of the Harvard Law Review influenced my opinion of him." And lo and behold...

It tells me a lot more that Politico had to dust off this part of his resume, which in my view means absolutely nothing. In almost every example that I've seen, Obama has seemed disingenuous at best, and even combative sometimes when conservative policy is suggested.

He may have been refreshingly reasonable in the early 90's, but his bed has clearly been made. And Karl Marx and Saul Alinsky are sleeping in it.

We do not know how intelligent Obama is. We do not know his SAT or LSAT scores. He was probably an affirmative action enrolee at Harvard Law. He was also probably put on the Law Review as affrirmative action. This would have been done by the faculty. There are approximately 50 students on the Law Review and they vote for the President. Esrich's comment that he was selected on merit implies that he was selected by the faculty which is not the case. In an election with 16 candidates all with high egos, it is entirely possible to see how Obama may have become the consensus pick because the truly academically talented cancelled each other out. It is interesting that there are a lot of glowing quotes from people 18 years after the fact. Not one contemporaneously recorded accolade. The President of the Law Review, which had 50 members, is essentially a managerial position. The attempt to clothe Obama with scholarship is laughable. The fact is that is U.S. history Obama may well be the only Editor of a major law review who has never published a single article. For those in the legal profession, this is absolutely amazing. No wonder he did not join a major law firm. Instead he wound up doing routine real estate work for a slum lord. Of course, in Chicago, there are major law firms that he could have joined. But most people in the know, know that they are just influence peddling mills that put in the fix with the machine controlled city and county. There is some question about the scholarship of the books Obama did write. In one of them, he wrote about someone and that someone and his friends and acquaintances challenged Obama's statements and Obama was forced to say that he had made "composite characters". In other words, he had just faked it. Oh, and about being on the faculty of Chicago Law and teaching constitutional law. Most people know that Con Law is just another poli psy course. In other words, there is no right or wrong. The same thing can be argued any which way. Breyer and Scalia can be on opposite sides of the same case and who is to say who is right. True the decision has to be followed but its just a decision until a new one might overule it. In a con law class the "professor" can BS with the class and everyone is happy. That's not the way it works in contract, patent or tax law. There ther Professor better know what he's talking about and telling his students.

"Some bloggers have claimed that the purported official State of Hawaii document, originally published by the radical left Daily Kos blog, is a fake, and a poorly executed one at that.

Examination of the higher resolution of the image indicates irregularities which suggest to some that the purported "certificate" may be a forgery produced or modified by Photoshop or another image-editing software, and not a genuine item. "

America leaders are totally Practising Marxist Communisim Ideology as a Country under Republican Party administration.These are the same people that rised together againts the United States High Court decision of closing the Guantanamo Bay detention camp set-up which totally againts and violates the Constitution United States of America and againts human right, in which are very similars with those Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, that situated in Oswiecim. This kind of practices come from a country that claims as a leader of Democracy values,this happening in 21 Century style of America dictatorship of rules.Its not even a surprise from the World propectives if Prescott Bush was of those supporters for the Nazi financial system that build the WWll which killed million of innocent human beings,many also tortured to death, and now this ideology flows along with the Republican Party and his grandson,the President of United States.